Nicholas A. Virgilio
Memorial Haiku and Senryu Competition 2024
THANK YOU FOR YOUR INTEREST IN THE 2024 NICHOLAS A VIRGILIO HAIKU AND SENRYU COMPETITION. The Contest has offically closed.
CONGRATULATIONS TO THE WINNERS
Teo Contac
Grade 7, Botosani, Romania
Emme Doyle
Grade 8, Atlanta, GA
Elsa Krol
Grade 9, State College, PA
Benjamin Moon-Chun
Grade 8, Decatur, GA
Maria Negrut
Grade 7, Botosani, Romania
Edi Parvu
Grade 7, Botosani, Romania
The Haiku Society of America judges have provided some commentary on each poem:
spring tide
the colored pencil box
she never used
Teo Contac — Grade 7, Botosani, Romania
~ ~ ~
cranberry sauce
in an antique bowl—
autumn deepens
Emme Doyle – Grade 8, Atlanta, GA
~ ~ ~
flower moon
touching the water
bullfrogs' thrum
Elsa Krol – Grade 9, State College, PA
~ ~ ~
rice cakes orbit
in a cloudy broth
lunar new year
Benjamin Moon-Chun – Grade 8, Decatur, GA
~ ~ ~
day moon . . .
mom still needs
a blood donor
Maria Negrut – Grade 7, Botosani, Romania
~ ~ ~
silent night
a cherry branch
hits the moon
Edi Parvu – Grade 7, Botosani, Romania
About our 2024 judges:
Sharon Pretti is a widely published poet and her work appears in numerous anthologies and journals including Spillway, Schuylkill Valley Journal, The MacGuffin, Calyx, JAMA, The Bellevue Literary Review and others. She has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations and was nominated for the Best New Poets 2024 Magazine. She is also an award-winning haiku poet and frequent contributor to haiku journals including Modern Haiku and Frogpond. In 2018, Sharon was selected as one of four poets for Open Iris, the Two Autumns Press chapbook published by Haiku Poets of Northern California. She had the pleasure of editing Filling in the Sky, the 2021 Two Autumns Press chapbook. She holds a masters of social work degree from UC Berkeley and spent the majority of her career at a large county hospital in San Francisco. There, she enjoyed leading a longstanding poetry class for the patients. For many years, she edited Kaleidoscope, an anthology of the patients’ poems. Sharon has also taught poetry workshops in assisted living facilities in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a native San Franciscan and continues to live in the city, enjoying the coastal fog and breezes.
M. Shane Pruett, PhD, is a bird watching, baking, guitar-playing father/husband who loves to travel and strives to write meaningfully about each of the facets of a wonderful life. He received a Sakura award and 2nd place in The First Yugen International Haiku Contest in 2021 and is a Pushcart and Touchstone nominated poet. Shane has been fortunate to be published in numerous haikai journals in recent years and is currently the Poetry Pea journal's haibun editor.